Dust Bowl

One of the Young branches of the family drifted off towards Iowa during the turn of the 20th century. My guess would be farm land was cheap and they felt that they could make their fortunes there. I was surprised to find that by 1930 many of them had moved on to California, Louisiana and Illinois. I was really surprised when I noticed that Truman Roscoe Young, who had owned a farm for almost 20 years, would move to Illinois and become a security guard for the YMCA. His brother David Lawrence Young, an attorney in Iowa for more than 20 years, moved in 1930 and was a manager in a printing shop in Los Angeles California.

The dust bowl was just another blip in my history learning someplace in school. I couldn’t even tell you what year the topic came up. By 1930 the south west states had over planted fields with wheat, today’s practice of crop rotation was not something they ever did. Wheat was getting a high price in the market and everyone wanted to jump on board. Of course the over production of wheat dropped the market price and the over planting of fields made the land ripe for what was going to happen next.

When the winds started blowing they picked up dirt and hurled it across the plain states. For 10 years the sky would blacken at times with enormous clouds of dirt rolling along the ground. I have lived in the north and experienced snow storms of varying degrees and the pictures of these mass moving clouds of brown make snow storms almost bearable. Wikipedia has pictures and there is video of what the dust bowl storms looked like.